


The Explanatory Memorandum

by haissitall



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:07:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22159852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haissitall/pseuds/haissitall
Summary: A stream of consciousness about what (maybe!) goes on in Breen's head. The best character in the game. Don't argue or I will not hesitate to cry.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	The Explanatory Memorandum

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Объяснительная](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/622006) by Haissitall. 



> Very not beta-read.

If you think too much, you will, sooner or later, turn into a monster.

It is a gradual movement from point “a” to point “b” to point “c”. From teenage rejection of violence to mature acceptance of some sacrifices and to the drained amputee drone-like people working a few storeys below your bedroom. At some point, Doctor Wallace Breen came to a conclusion that there was nothing particularly wrong with being a dictator surrounded by lobotomized prisoner cyborgs. Anyone who hadn’t come to it yet had thought either not long or not thoroughly enough. If you think long enough, imagining all possible scenarios in excruciating detail from an emotionally detached standpoint, you will understand that taking people’s internal organs out is the lesser evil.

Or not evil at all. Humanity had become fat and pupating, weaving the world web around itself. How to make it stop hibernating and kick it towards the stars? Only with sticks, dragging it by its hair, kicking and screaming, taking away all its toys. What would have awaited humanity if not for this nightmare? Only banality, only stooped bending down to the roots of countries and nationalities without a single glance to the stars.

But Wallace Breen had always been looking there. As if he knew he would once get a tour with personal guides. He was shown the cosmos like a village boy a big city, and he was shaking from what he was seeing: huge, huge, dangerous, horrifying, spectacular, there were gas giants, and sentient fungi, and stars, clapped in metal, and the nightmares of other dimensions. He was later ordered to declare Earth’s surrender, and he sarcastically frowned at how inappropriate it sounded. What silly concepts: surrender, bargains, how many people we’ll give away, how many bases we’ll build, these are all such trivialities, really. As if they were kinglets from the Middle Ages, dividing acres of pastures among themselves. He had seen something his language has no words for, and was given administrative work and bureaucratic terms. But he agreed, of course.

They made a copy of him back then, like lines of code to a backup hard drive. This meant Wallace Breen from twenty years ago still existed somewhere, and it made him smile uncomfortably. Today’s Wallace Breen would have nothing to discuss with that copy. Unlike it, he had twenty years to think a little more.

Sometimes, thinking and thinking in the long evenings, getting fragmented sleep from halves of pills, Wallace Breen wanted his brain operated on too. He would be glad to join the Combine in the biomechanical rapture, drill a hole in the throat and become a serial number on the blue screens. There’s no glory in this fate, but it has dignity. The Combine had massive experience in assimilation of all kinds of creatures, and if the best thing one could do with a human is to make them a faceless battle unit… Then so be it.

The evolution is ruthless in its practicality. The universe had been thinking for a long time and became a monster as a result. The Combine had been thinking for way longer than humanity and became a parasite, which grabbed planets by their throats and shook everything they had in their pockets out of them, like a school bully stealing lunch money. Was it worth it, becoming so technologically advanced, defying the sun and breaking through to other dimension only to end up mugging planets in the dark alleys, menacingly fidgeting with a knife?

It’s not up to Wallace Breen to judge, of course. If that’s what such an advanced civilization came up with, how can he come up with something better in his laughingly short human life? Perhaps there was grace in this way too, there was the romantics of the unification, the light of the progress, and maybe somewhere combine Kipling was writing poetry about the combine burden. Perhaps it will even be criticized by the combine descendants, but Earth will probably not live to see that day.

Wallace Breen laughed at his thoughts and approved of plans to accelerate Earth’s integration into the Union. Then the awkward media pushed hard to give birth to explanations as to why taking people’s internal organs out was the lesser evil. Wallace Breen explained as well as he could, honestly telling about planets, stars, immortality and higher purpose, he built complex sentences and used terminology alien to most of the scarce population. If he had a good political consultant, she would tell him that he needed to appear more simple and then maybe people wouldn’t bang on his door with Molotov's cocktails. When the situation’s bad, the superstitions need to be capitalized on, not bashed. Instincts need to be played with, not denied. Wallace Breen behaved childishly. Couldn’t he have used a better suited rhetoric?

But Wallace Breen didn’t have any political consultants because firstly, he was the Administrator, a very non-political position, and secondly, to be the dictator of the whole Earth and unable to be honest seemed just too pathetic. That’s why he spoke his actual thoughts, being silent only about a few of them. 

What if the Combine are not invulnerable, for example. Or what if one can be better than the Combine. What if one can play a cruel joke on them, absorb them, adopt technologies, take away the cultural superiority and go on thinking, thinking beyond empty digestion of the worlds they could reach, to the unity more perfect, more pure and more incomprehensible to the human language. The language would be forgotten and Earth would be lost, left to heal its wounds. They would go on thinking and imagine a completely different universe.

But Wallace Breen himself was still sitting behind his desk, surrounded by the lobotomized prisoner cyborgs, and looked through reports on cubic meters of pumped out ocean and the numbers of the drained amputee drone-like people who were delivered a few storeys below his quarters. He saw them once and nearly puked. 342 units. Name and signature.

He had made it to the “monster” point. The next one was still nowhere to be seen.


End file.
